Electronic information systems including communication networks and various computer networks have become prevalent and relied-upon in all aspects of today's society. This is true in the technological community, business and industry, the military, government and in various other areas of information technology and communications. Many businesses, technologies, governments and people are critically dependent upon the uninterrupted and reliable operation of these information systems. An information warfare or other attack on such an information system can disable the system and bring activity to a standstill. The impact of such an attack may be devastating and therefore such attacks upon information systems must be prevented. Measures should be taken to study the attacks that may occur, predict when they may occur and also predict their impact upon the information system. Understanding the impact of an expected attack increases information assurance for mission critical components of a communication network.
It is difficult to assess the impact such an attack would have on a system without actually running the attack on the system. This is obviously undesirable because if the attack is actually run on the system, it may destroy or disable the system. One way to study the impact of an attack upon an information system is to simulate the attack using models of the attack, the target and the system. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/964,879 entitled Embedded Real-Time Information System Cyber Attack Damage Assessment Method and System and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/965,248 entitled Flood Attack Projection Model, each by the applicant inventors, describe various aspects of such a system and are each hereby incorporated by reference as if set forth in their entireties. In order to evaluate the impact of the simulated attack upon the system, the models need to interact with each other without affecting the simultaneously operating information system.
In other information systems, models of other network services may be created and propagate through the information system, and these models will similarly need to interact with other models of the systems in order to assess the impact of one of the system models upon the behavior of the other system model or models.
It would therefore be desirable to provide an information system or communication network in which such models could so interact.